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News

Our Global Money Week 2017

March 28, 2017

It’s Global Money Week – an annual celebration of the work going on around the world to inspire young people to think about money and finances. And we’re taking the opportunity to let you know about what we’re doing to make sure people in the UK are able to manage their finances better.

Celebrating our work with young people work

The Money Charity is one of the largest organisations helping schools across England, Wales and Northern Ireland to deliver financial education. Our network of trained consultants go into schools to deliver workshops directly for young people.

Sometimes when you go from classroom to classroom every day, it’s hard to imagine the scale of impact you’re having. But last year alone, we went into schools nearly a thousand times, working with 23,360 young people. This week, we will reach our 160,000th student since we began to do this six years ago!

Because our work in schools is so important to what we do, 2016 was also a year where we resolved to play our part in the national debate about how we can ensure financial education is delivered in schools. Back in 2014, financial education became part of the curriculum in English schools. Heralded as a great leap forward, political attention quickly moved away from the issue, and those of us working in the sector saw little change on the ground.

Surveying and interviewing teachers, we set about to find out what, if anything, had actually changed.

In our report, which has been downloaded hundreds of times and was picked up by policymakers in Whitehall and Westminster, we found that while most schools deliver some finance education, teachers have little faith in its quality and are held back by insufficient time, negligible resources and school leaderships who do not view it as a high priority. A third of teachers didn’t even know it was on the curriculum. Schools need greater resources, clearer leadership, and a mixed model of provision that includes direct delivery by experts from outside schools.

The Money Charity’s main offer in financial education is direct delivery. Our research shows it’s not always the case that teachers and schools have the skills and resources to deliver good financial education. So our expert consultants are armed with resources that have been years in the making are a godsend for teachers who know their students need to learn about money, but are not in a position to make that happen without help.

We’ve got years of experience developing the tools and resources to help our consultants deliver top-notch financial education. And now we have used that learning to create teacher resources so schools can supplement our workshops and deliver lessons in-house.

It’s not just the work we do with young people that has is going from strength to strength. We’ve also recently been able to expand our adult team, bringing fresh energy to our workshops, finding dozens of new clients so that we can help adults across the UK to get to grips with their finances and build a happier, more secure future.

We believe that everybody needs help to stay on top of their money, which it is why it is so important that we deliver our workshops to varied audiences. Over the past few months we’ve worked with clients as wide ranging as veterinary surgeries and homeless shelters. We look forward to nearly 20 sessions booked in for the next few months alone with law firms, learning disability charities and community groups.